


An Imperial Fathom

by orphan_account



Series: Ignorance Is a Condition of Learning [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reverse Falls, Backstory, Different Interpretation, Drowning, Gen, Mild Language, Reverse Pines, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-04-07 07:09:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4254102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pacifica Southeast goes with her uncle and her cousin to the pool and meets a merman that's uninterested in pleasantries, and learns a little more about Mabel Gleeful by proxy. <br/>-<br/>The Reverse Pines version of "The Deep End", takes place before "The Persistence of Naivety".</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Imperial Fathom

**Author's Note:**

> To keep the Reverse Pines au as cleanly compared and realistic as I can, I keep Gideon at age twelve and age up all other main characters accordingly. Mabel Gleeful, Dipper Gleeful, Pacifica Southeast, and Mermando are all fifteen human years old. Mermando's age is debatable when it comes to what it is in merman years.

It had taken Pacifica twenty minutes in line at Overalls Are Cool Now to buy a semi-decent bathing suit. It wasn't the worst thing she'd ever laid her eyes on, but the town's most chic store had a strange obsession with plaid and she had had to roll out with a one piece in the most subdued shade of green she'd ever laid her eyes on. Not even something with a cute floral pattern, like the Seventeen magazines under her bed promised were in season. Just _plaid_.

It was a lumberjack's paradise, she was certain.

Uncle Bud had unceremoniously announced a last minute pool trip with a lot of enthusiasm and by throwing water wings up in the air. He said it was a great day for something cold and, hey, it was about time they flexed their pool membership! Gideon barely peeked his nose out of the journal but, after a whirlwind of Pacifica jamming her legs through her suit and wiggling into the top in the bathroom, she finds him standing in his swimming shorts, arms crossed over his chest. "I just don' know why we're even leavin' the house." He huffs, looking at a frayed bit of carpet in the corner of the room. He doesn't meet her eye. "We got air-conditioning and that's all good for us!"

His father has an unreadable look in his eye as he folds sweaty palm over sweaty palm, regarding his son in a manner Pacifica can't decipher. "Well, boy, we just all, uh, have'ta get out of the house once in a little while." He drags his knuckles across his perspiring brow and Pacifica thinks about the stash of gum crammed under her mattress in the guest bedroom in an attempt to distance herself from... Whatever was happening here.

Gideon grunts and rolls his eyes. "Fine, I guess we're heading out then." Bud Pines purses his lips briefly, then spins on his heel, quickly leaving out to the garage. As the owner of a used car dealership, he bought the best in the lot, though the motor still made gravelly sounds of protest whenever he turned the keys. Gideon turns to his cousin, apologetic and with big blue eyes. "I'm so sorry you had'ta see that, Paz." He sighs and runs his fingers carefully over his slicked hair, knowing it would be ruined in the chlorine pool. "I'm just so close to figuring out somethin' _big_ , you know? All these messages in it, I feel like they're supposed to spell something out."

He looks at her like she understands and she plays pretend that she does. She can't even understand the rapture he regards the book with, let alone empathize with him. "I know, Gids, but you have to at least give your dad a little time to know you." She's joking, punctuated by bumping against his hip. "I bet he feels like he's losing you to a book!"

Gideon snorts like that was the most ridiculous thing he's ever seen and doesn't dignify her with a response as he follows his dad to the car.  

Pacifica hides the itch under her skin with a loud laugh to an empty house.

-

The pool is crowded on a hot day, but even more so on a lukewarm day in Gravity Falls. Everyone seemed to enjoy the fact that they could gripe to their chair-neighbor about how it wasn't the worst it was going to get and, boy, could you expect a hot summer this time around!

Gideon doesn't really care for all the old lady talk, but indulges Lazy Susan for a couple of rounds of gossip and weather discussion. It involved a lot of "it looks like it's gonna be windy" followed by "are you sure? there's not a cloud in the sky"'s for about five minutes before he had to wander off. He used the nonexistent sweltering heat as an excuse and jumped into the pool and almost onto a very small little boy.

Lazy Susan continued to talk to the empty air where he previously stood, despite having accepted his goodbye.

Gideon tries not to muss his hair up any further than he absolutely has to, but a kid with a Supersoaker ruins that plan, so he dunks his whole head into the water. He wonders what kind of chemicals he just released into the pool from his hair, and then regrets not having showered off beforehand like Pacifica or his dad. He'd probably just created another Gravity Falls phenomena out of hair gel and sweat. He floats on his back in the very small amount of space he's allotted by way of public pool convention, thinking of slime monsters.

Pacifica's first action when she left the locker room was to scan the crowd for the Gleeful twins. Mabel wasn't too bad to talk to, once you got past her poorly timed smiles and need to relate everything back to the Tent. And Pacifica was still kinda sorry about the whole Gideon mess- passively watching her twelve-year-old cousin aggressively pursue a girl her age and then try to kill her brother for being under suspicion of being a supernatural creature was pretty high on her "Summer Regrets" list. And, well, aside from being physically creepy, Dipper Gleeful didn't seem like a bad influence at all. Their acts were cool so, by proxy, they were pretty cool too.

She's a little disappointed when she doesn't find the gleam of Mabel's blue headband or the flash of paled skin across knuckles as Dipper fixes his tacky bolo tie. While she didn't understand how they did what they did, the twins always seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and it rubbed a sense of purpose off onto her. It would've been nice to hang out with someone not in middle school, too.

She buoys her way over to the deeper end, where only one other patron is bobbing up and down, his thumb scratching at a hint of a beard. He's well-crafted, Pacifica at least has to acknowledge that, and his stomach keeps doing a rippling motion that makes sparkler-like sensations light up in her brain. He bobs down for a particularly long time, his brown hair a halo above him as he sunk, to the point where she became worried. "Uh, hey, you okay down there?" She can't find any bubbling at the surface, and tries to wave over the red headed lifeguard, who looked like she was doing taxes on the high chair.

Feeling slightly pinned, she dips down and squints her eyes against the burning chlorine, only to find bright brown eyes staring back at her. Pacifica immediately pulls back to the surface, gasping for air, more than a little startled. Pulling up her big-girl pants, she dove back down, treading water as the cute guy winked at her, his stomach doing the ripple thing.

Feeling a little lightheaded (whether from lack of oxygen or simple animal attraction) and not particularly thinking clearly, her eyes follow the cut of his stomach lower, where it bit off into a sharp 'v'.

He grins with sharp teeth when she finds his tail and gasps involuntarily, taking in water and sinking for the briefest of seconds. "Hola." His eyes hold some luminescence that she can see even in the bright day, and she pulls herself up again, gasping and slightly choking. She starts to swim away, if anything because a cute stranger with sharp teeth has never worked out for her, but a dark shadow looms around her, even as she pulls to the edge of the deep end. When trying to signal Gideon from across the pool failed (uh, holy shit, a mermaid? In the public pool? That was totally up his alley), she dove back down. "Me llaman _Mermando_."

She makes a chatting motion with her hand, four fingers to her thumb, then points to the surface. She can't talk underwater like he can, and he can obviously come out of the water a little bit. She totally saw him do it earlier. He tilts his head to the side, not confused, not wondering but... Pacifica's eyes flare wider when she recognizes the expression as mocking. She points above the water again, a little angry, lips in a pout as the air let out by her noise pushes bubbles to the surface.

He shakes his head and tilts his head back, letting out a strange, shrill sound. She covers her ears immediately and, in the one second of instinct, his arms wrap around her waist, holding her pressed against him.

More than panicked with every flash of his thin and pointed teeth, Pacifica kicks at his tail, feels her pedicure bend from where her toes meet unyielding scale. His skin is rough, somewhat hooked, like a cat's tongue, and it leaves her fists covered in scratches when she beats her fists against his back. She starts to scream for help, but as soon as she opens her mouth, Mermando yanks her further downwards, causing a rush of water into her mouth.

Gagging and feeling black pressure around her eyes, she struggles against drowning and the death grip around her waist. She damns the one piece with its cheap material, as his skin sticks to it and holds her even more efficiently in place. She connects solidly only once, a glance across his cheek and into his nose, but it wasn't enough to even jostle him. Settling for wriggling to her death, Pacifica finds her sense of direction slowly fogging up.

The pool was eight feet deep at this end and deep enough for her bubbled cries to barely reach the surface. She goes limp after an avid last stand, and Mermando seizes his prey with a look of equal menace and glee.

Pacifica Southeast is saved by both the grace of God and by an elderly woman's strong and heavy breaststroke.

Lazy Susan, in her tablecloth-printed one piece, had decided to do laps around the pool while the sun was still shining and, beginning at the deep end, had miscalculated how deep she wanted to start off. So, accidentally, her elbow pounded into what looked like two teenagers getting a little too personal through her one good eye. She pulls to the surface to apologize, but sees Pacifica float upward, turning around slowly to face the sun, jerking unconsciously, her lips a slight blue.

The lifeguard, pulled from balancing her other employer's checkbook only by the sound of public alarm, looks up to find the scene of the pool had changed since she last looked up during adult swim. She places the checkbook to the side carefully, before blaring on her whistle, climbing down from the hindrance of a chair. Diving into the water, Wendy Corduroy is faithful to the job and drags Pacifica out of the water, guarding her life.

It takes three rounds of chest compressions and mouth to mouth to get her to gag up the water weighing down her lungs, but only two for the color to return to her face. Bud has already dialed nine-one-one, his fingers slippery on his flip phone, and the ambulance promises to be there within an hour. They arrive in half, and load Pacifica onto a stretcher, despite Wendy's protests that 'she was going to be fine, don't waste your money on a hospital bill'.

Pacifica spends the night in the hospital dreaming of thin pupils in brown eyes and bright blue sea glass, unsure of the connection, but waking up covered in sweat several times.

-

Gideon brings her the newspaper in the morning, folded in half, as some sort of peace offering. He held some guilt over his distance from his cousin, and couldn't help but feel like he should've watched over her a bit more. It's not a magazine or a season of Teen Wolf (which he complains about endlessly- "That's not an accurate depiction of werewolves, Paz!"), but he wanted to give her something to look at other than the four white walls.

It was the recent copy of the Gravity Falls Gossiper, the only one he could get for a quarter and a snail shell out of his pocket, and the headline read "Swimming With the Fishes: Skeleton discovered in local pool!"

The Gleefuls were cited as potential suspects (as they always were when something supernatural happened), though the after-hours footage showed no sign of entry nor struggle, and the police weren't searching awfully hard for the perpetrator. The murder had taken place in the day, and no one had seen anything suspicious then, so they declared the case cold and moved on.

Pacifica smashes the paper into her face until she thinks she can feel the words rub off onto her face.

She knows that the skeleton was almost her, that Mabel and Dipper had jack shit to do with the murder, and her heart monitor spikes hard enough to alarm her nurse.

-

It takes two nights out of the hospital for Bud's eyes to wander from her. Playing the good, concerned uncle was difficult for him and his general inattention, and he finally stopped poking his head into the guest bedroom every night to check on her. Mrs. Pines is still nowhere to be found after two weeks of absence, and Pacifica isn't sure whether or not it was a good or bad thing.

She had started disappearing a lot after Gideon picked up the journal.

Pacifica is the ruling supreme of scaling out of multiple-story houses, so the Pines' one story was always slightly underwhelming to break out of. Stuffing pillows underneath her bedsheets in the general shape of her body, she popped open the window (screen less, so easy), and was out, one leg at a time. Her rain boots were made with grips on the bottoms, and she's brandishing two bath bombs in her pockets.

Merman or no, there was no way she was letting 'Mermando' (what a stupid name!) kill again.

She'd severely underestimated the proximity of the pool in relation to her uncle's house, and she can feel her feet blossom in blisters by the time she sees the gate. Her hands had begun to sweat from wearing a raincoat in the middle of the summer, and she had had to reluctantly pull her hands from her pockets. She didn't want to have her only weapon dissolve under her fingertips, even if she was unsure if her plan would work.

Her plan being: toss in bath bombs to pollute the water and run- and hope that the cameras don't catch her.

She pulls up the hood to hide her hair and has her foot in the bottom of the fence farthest from the camera, ready to boost herself up, when she sees something move, hears a loud exhale of breath.

Mabel Gleeful pulls herself from apparent shadows, out of the sight of the single security camera, turned strangely to the far left. She's wearing something that makes Pacifica think "Wednesday Adams", goth chic with long sleeves and material down to her ankles. She toes the water carefully, wrinkling her nose and, despite the fact that Mabel has never antagonized her, Pacifica thinks she's going to melt in the water.

She steps in, all hesitation drawn from her face, her lips set in a frown. Mabel walks down the steps into the pool with a set purpose, a set anger in her brow, and Pacifica feels her tongue press against her heart, too terrified to call out and warn her about the siren in the water.

"I told you I would get you back into the ocean." Her voice is clear-cut and ripe with a bitterness so acrid that it makes Pacifica's stomach roll, even though the anger wasn't directed towards her. She stands only knee-deep, the dress rippling around her like a clinging shadow. "I told you what food I could provide you."

Pacifica stands frozen, foot jammed in the gate, unsure if even breathing would be a wise move. The bath bomb was wearing away to dust, moving back and forth in her pocket, and she was sure she was going to cough if she kept her mouth open for any longer.

Mermando rises gracefully, throwing his hair back and over his shoulder, before ducking back under the water, so that his neck was covered. "And yet, here I am." He's close enough to take a bite out of her neck, but the dress provides her a halo of reserved space. He licks his teeth in what could be interpreted as either flirting or threatening, but Mabel rolls her eyes. Almost disappointed, he swims counter-clockwise around her. Hell, Pacifica half expects him to make clicking sounds like the alligator from Peter Pan. "I am still in this American public pool, and I have been feed everything but human remains." He arcs his back dramatically, running a hand over his forehead. "I don't know how long my stomach and my hearts can take this."

She crossed her arms. "You can take it as long as it takes for me to be able to get you out of here." She squints off to the side, where Pacifica can see the camera, jerked to the side. "There's a lot going on that you don't know about, Mermando."

"What?" His eyes are dark, more black pupil than white sclera, and Pacifica jerks her foot away from the fence so hard that the metal rattles. So entrenched in their conversation, neither of them notice her presence. "What, things are so complicated that you and your blank-eyed brother can't think of something to-"

He's at her two o'clock when her hand snaps out, opening and closing on his throat like a mouth unto itself. Her self made manicure bites into his throat and she pulls him two inches up and away from the water, her face set into a permanent scowl. "You'll get out of this pool when I can get you out of this pool. My brother has nothing to do with what I'm doing here."

Pacifica knows her shows, knows Mabel balanced on her fingertips on top of a circus ball, knows audience-told anecdotes of her being a former acrobat, but she'd never considered how that kind of strength would translate. She feels like a member of the audience all over again, held transfixed by the Gleeful's newest performance: threatening a supernatural creature that ate a man's bone marrow the day previous. Her fingertips flicker with a light Pacifica can't pick up from her position, but it makes Mermando's pupils shrink into slits and it makes him squirm to get away.

It takes her a second to realize Mabel was holding him by the _gills_.

She tosses him to the side carelessly, towards the edge of the pool, another threat of leaving him on land and stranded from the water. She sinks lower into the water, moving towards him as he sputters, respiratory system desperately attempting to translate water into oxygen again. "You're out of your depth here, merman." Mabel turns on her bare feet and leaves him struggling, uncaring about any retaliation.

Clutching his throat, Mermando remains silent, even as Mabel leaves the pool, her hair untouched by the water, her dress miraculously dry. His fingers skim blackened skin and curling, deep brown scales, and Pacifica can only watch, frozen, as Mabel exits through the front gate and loops around towards her.

Her eyes are tired and kind and a special type of worn out that reminds Pacifica of cheerleaders after a big game. She looks like she wants to peel off her eyelashes and lay down in a bathtub for three months. "You shouldn't be out so late, Pacifica." She sighs, runs her fingers through her hair. So close, Pacifica can see her pink lip gloss and her light foundation. "I'll walk you home. It's dangerous out here."

She curls her hand underneath Pacifica's upper arm, as if she knew how hooked her heels were on the spot she was standing on. Just as she's about to pull her back towards Uncle Bud's house, Pacifica feels her lips part and a small peep comes out, "Was that a pun?"

Mabel stops for a second and turns to Pacifica, and she takes note of Mabel's appearance in a frighteningly intimate way. Her eyes were a deep bark brown, a puppy brown, brown like her favorite hoodie and her childhood stuffed bears. Her showtime blue eyes must've been contacts for the performance.

Must've been.

She doesn't hear Mabel the first time around, just watched her lips form words without connecting them to a meaning. The second time, she speaks slower, eyebrows wrinkling. "What was that?"

Dazed with the severity of the scene she'd just watched crashing down on her, Pacifica immediately echoes herself, "The last thing you said to him, was that a pun?"

Mabel takes her in, scrutinizes her with a gaze that makes her wriggle in her boots. Then she tosses her head back, laughing loudly with a soft snort at the back of it. It's human in a way that comforts her, makes her tense arm relax under Mabel's grip. "Yeah," Mabel glances back at the pool, the security camera panning back to the right as Mermando disappeared under the surface. "Yeah, I guess it was."

-

Pacifica doesn't remember the walk home, but wakes up tucked in her bed, her rain jacket hanging on the back of her desk chair. She wonders if the previous night was all a dream, with her bath bombs on the edge of the bathtub where she'd taken them the previous night.

Gideon and Bud Pines both assure her that they don't have to go back to the pool so soon, that she still might need to rest, but a chipper smile and her can-do look in her bathing suit convinces them to at least let her tag along with them.

Despite her better judgement, her first action was to swim a lap around the edge of the pool. Her panic-coded body screams for her to leave, that there was a shark in the water, but she has to push past it. Living in Gravity Falls with an instinct not to swim was a death wish.

She slows down when the signs across the pool fade from five feet to six feet, and she ducks her head underwater, looking around through squinted eyes, looking for her reason for coming back.

 

Mermando was gone.

 

 


End file.
